ASNN

cooking is fun

So I'm cooking for 35 ladies at our church on Friday; it's a delayed Valentine's dinner that the men are putting on for the women. I wouldn't have been too involved with the dinner, except that I heard they were going to serve them pre-made lasagna from CostCo. I took over the entire cooking duties at that point.

The menu is as follows:

Start with a salad of spring greens lightly tossed in an olive oil and balsamic vinegar dressing. Served with crusty Italian bread.

Next is a hand-made roasted red pepper soup.

The main course is Chicken Saltimboca: thin chicken breasts topped with prosciutto and spinach, rolled into a tight roll and pinned with a toothpick. The chicken rolls are pan-seared, then cooked in chicken stock and lemon juice until cooked through. The chicken is removed and the sauce (to be poured over the chicken at serve time) is reduced until thick. The rolls are sliced diagonally, dusted with parmesan, and served leaning against the pasta.

The side dish is angel hair pasta tossed with broccoli in a goat cheese and butter sauce, garnished with toasted pine nuts. (I'm thinking I'll use toasted slivered almonds instead to keep costs down.)

For dessert, I'm thinking a simple fruit (lime?) sorbet with chocolate-dipped Italian pastry straws and coffee.

I made this meal (minus the salad and dessert) for dinner tonight and it was absolutely wonderful. And surprisingly easy; with a little bit of help with the food prep I was able to complete the entire meal in just over the recommended time. Not bad since I was basically operating by myself, cooking three recipes for the first time, and saddled with an acute shortage of cooking utensils and pottery.

As for how the meal went over: the kids liked the chicken and prosciutto, and picked out most of the broccoli. They thought the pasta sauce was a little too rich; then again, they prefer the $0.79 mac and cheese to anything. (Something about "pearls before swine" should go here, methinks.) Nase and I loved it, though she was a little afraid of the prosciutto's potency. But she did like it, as did I.

If I weren't doing this for church, I'd serve a somewhat sweet, fairly dry white wine, like a sweeter Sauvignon Blanc or a drier Chardonnay. Too-sweet wines would simply accentuate the already-rich meal, while too-dry wines wouldn't lend enough refreshment to a rather-dry meal. Soup and salad would be served with a very dry, light white, like Pinot Grigio. Dessert would be served with a sweet dessert white, possibly a late-harvest Riesling. If beer were on the menu, I'd have a pale ale, perhaps an IPA if I felt particularly spicy. None of the food is spicy, though, and I wouldn't want to overpower it with a particularly-strong IPA.

If you haven't figured it out, I love to cook, to prepare and present nice meals. If there's one problem, it's that I'm usually uninterested in eating once I've put 90 minutes or so into something this complex. If there's any other problem, it's that eating this way would put me on the street in no time; the total cost was about $30, including some re-usable items that I needed anyway. But at the end of the day, I don't really consider either of those a real problem...

Posted by pcg at March 2, 2004 7:57 PM